May 5, 1991

A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR By Mark Helprin. 792 pp. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $24.95.

The children of the 60's have returned. Twenty years have passed, and many of us, through folly, hubris or mischance, have died or been left sleeping in the land of the lotus-eaters. The palace has been taken over by shallow upstarts, raiding and wasting the treasury laid up by so many noble generations. It's time to clean house. The No. 1 problem today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. The idea of expertise in any one area of the humanities, with its subsequent phenomenon of faculty recruitment by time-framed slots, was always mistaken. It was inspired, in this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously, by nervous emulation of the sciences, where one can indeed deeply and profitably specialize in moths, ferns or igneous rocks. But there is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion.

Bangladeshis and international disaster experts are criticizing the Government's slow response in assessing needs and moving supplies to survivors of the cyclone that struck this country with devastating force on Monday. Five days after the storm ravaged a long stretch of the southeastern coast, the national news agency's estimate of the death toll stood at 125,200 today. Earlier speculation that 200,000 people may have drowned was not repeated today, although one newspaper spoke of 150,000 deaths.

In a daylong series of meetings yesterday with Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, legislative leaders, local officials and union representatives, Mayor David N. Dinkins sketched out a dire plan to end New York City's fiscal slide through cuts in city services and work force that go far deeper than any the Mayor had said might be needed. Mr. Dinkins said the plan would produce a "meaner" and less livable city but could not be avoided without increased state aid and concessions from the unions. The meetings at Gracie Mansion, which began with a private 90-minute session with Governor Cuomo at 8:30 A.M., were clearly the Mayor's most serious effort yet to get that help.

A HIGH-TECH Navy research center that moved here from Ridgecrest, Calif., is helping the city attract housing and businesses to a narrow canal skirting the western edge of downtown. The Navy's Electronics Manufacturing Productivity Facility anchors a science and technology park rising next to the canal. The park is a joint venture of the Browning Investments development firm and Near North Development Corporation, a not-for-profit neighborhood entity.